Fall 2026-Winter 2027
Fall 2026
ENGL 5004F: Studies in Transnational Literatures (cross-listed with ARTH 5112F/CLMD 6102F/MGDS 5002E)
Prof. Sarah Casteel
Topic: Black Europe
This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical texts that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Together, we will read, look at, and listen to works by Black European intellectuals, activists, writers, artists, performers, and musicians. Challenging an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space, these works reframe European history and culture through Black perspectives.
The interdisciplinary, or “undisciplined,” design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional frameworks. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art, and music.
ENGL 5005F: M.A. Seminar
Prof. Sarah Brouillette
This seminar is a space for MA students to gather as a cohort and discuss a range of practical matters: developing graduate research strategies, grading essays, leading seminars, crafting grant proposals, and understanding employment and academic opportunities available to graduates, both inside and outside the university. We will also discuss, as a cohort and with a number of guests, what is means to study and teach English literature today. How do you decide what to teach and how to teach? What are the most urgent research topics right now? What developments are shaping English departments, and graduate education, in Canada and elsewhere?
ENGL 5303F: Studies in Early Modern Literature I (cross-listed with ENGL 4301A/HUMS 4902A)
Prof. Micheline White
Topic: Tudor Queens: Sex, Power, and Writing in the Lives of Katherine Parr, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I
Renaissance queens have long fascinated the reading public, but their political power and literary writings have only recently become the objects of academic study. In this seminar, we will explore early modern attitudes towards the concepts of a “queen consort,” a “queen regent,” a “queen regnant” and a “dowager queen.” We will focus in particular on the queen regnant who was understood to be both male and female: she had a female “body natural,” but occupied a masculine “body politic.” Over the course of the semester we will engaged in a detailed exploration of the three queens’ textual and visual productions including speeches, published prose works, diplomatic letters, poetry, translations, and portraits. Students will be introduced to early modern paleography and book history. We will also consider the depictions of these queens in recent films and TV programs.
ENGL 5402F: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature (cross-listed with ENGL 4115B)
TBC
Topic: The Nature and Uses of 18th Century Book Subscription Lists
This course aims to provide students with the context and nature of subscription lists and give students the opportunity for original research in this field. Initially students will be given a theoretical background to subscription lists and lessons on how the 18th century book trade worked: how was paper made, how was type set, how were books printed and bound, what was the role of bookseller, of publishing congers, etc. Then each shall pick a subscription list to work on as we can now access almost all the books published in the 18th century by subscription (some 3,000) through the Library. Students may choose any list. For example, if they are interested in female poets they might chose Mary Leapor whose work was published posthumously by subscription. Each week in the seminar, they will report on what they have learned about the people on the list and what has evaded them. As each student reports we will discuss how each may progress. There are so many things which we can learn from subscription lists and very little has been done in this field in the past. Some of the topics which may be examined might include the number of female subscribers, the number of people from the mercantile class, the number of members of the aristocracy, or from academia, or the clergy, or other sub groups. How did this subscription list fit into the publishing industry in the eighteenth century? Where does the volume fit in the 18th century canon?
By the end of the course, the hope is that each student will have done sufficient research (and learned how to do it) to produce a paper worthy of presentation at a conference or as an article in a journal.
ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I
Prof. Brian Greenspan
Topic: Digital Dystopia
A survey of utopian and dystopian thinking around media and technology.
The enormous popularity of dystopian narratives in recent years is hardly surprising, given the daily barrage of stories about war, climate change, pandemics, mass surveillance, and AI. What is surprising is that even the most disturbing stories of real or imaginary technological apocalypse continue to inspire utopian hope, and to shape our identities in ways that are progressive and collective. Does literature still offer a viable enclave within the broader networks of new media? How can fiction help us to imagine a better world in a “post-truth” era that coopts the strategies of fictionality itself?
This seminar will explore the role of new media and technologies in contemporary fiction. We will read utopian and dystopian narratives alongside studies of science fiction, technology, and intentional communities. We will also explore new digital tools for analyzing texts, visualizing data, authoring stories, and/or building simulations in order to better evaluate the hopeful or apocalyptic discourses surrounding new media.
ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201A/WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson
Topic: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’
This course undertakes a critical examination of the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s. We look at archival materials and media representations from the period, as well as recent scholarship on the complex legacies of the movement and ambivalent relations to it. Our readings include movement writing and periodicals, autobiography, art installation, film, manifesto and ephemera as we work with several Canadian archives. Our interests are in the movement’s rhetorics, figures, and emotions; its practices of consciousness raising, formation of collectives and direct action; its wild imagination and something like its ‘atmosphere.’ We pay attention to the uncertain and contested meanings of ‘woman’ and ‘women’; the construction of ‘lesbian feminist’ as a social identity; the attempt to produce an analysis of gendered labour under capitalism through the concept of social reproduction. Throughout, we’ll be thinking about the movement’s staging both within and against colonialism, racism, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course aims to be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space and is for anyone interested in learning how to think about identities and politics historically. Women’s Liberation took shape in a world very different to ours–before the structural and ideological changes of neoliberalism in the later decades of the 20th century, which is part of what we’ll work to understand as we look at a movement in its moment of messy eruption and relate to its memory as a complex inheritance.
ENGL 5900F: Selected Topics in English Studies I (cross-listed with ENGL 4607A/WGST 4812C/WGST 5901C)
Prof. Jodie Medd
Topic: Queer/ Feminist/ Life/ Writing
This course takes queer/feminist/life/writing as a suggestive constellation for exploring a range of hybrid texts that include elements of biofiction/biostory, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, critical fabulation, autotheory, and more. We will study twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts—many by writers working across literary and academic forms—to consider how authors have engaged with, innovated, and disrupted forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. The writers on our course are attuned to how individual, embodied experience is formed—and de-formed—by structures of power and narrative modes. Their work engages these connections through formal innovations to make us perceive, think, and read differently. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to theoretical frameworks and socio-cultural-political issues. Students will have the option to develop a final creative/critical project of personal interest to them, inspired by the hybrid life/writing from the course.
Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood; parenthood; loss and grief; Black life and the afterlife of slavery; racial capitalism; trans narratives; queer Indigeneity and the Canadian colonial project; illness narratives; disability justice; subjectivity, representation and the writing “I;” community and care; lifewriting and the archives; the literary institution and the work of empire; intimate partner abuse; trauma and recovery; art, academia and activism; genrification . . . and more.
Expect authors/creators on the course to include: Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Paul B Preciado, Christina Sharpe, Joshua Whitehead, and Virginia Woolf.
ENGL 6005F: Theory & Practice of Literary Studies
Prof. Julie Murray
Topic: Bookish
The expressions “nose in a book” or “lost in a book” elicit an association of “bookish” people with solitary and private reading, sometimes bordering on the anti-social. But a different sense of bookish means almost the opposite: today, on social media (Booktok and Bookstagram for instance), to be bookish is to be extremely online, possibly parasocial, and definitely invested in the ostentatious curation and display of books. This course will explore the history (18th C to the present day) of these two seemingly opposed senses of bookish – the first focusing on the inside of books, and the second on the outside. Topics will include: the materiality of books; the history of the codex book; bibliomania through the ages; select moments in the history of reading, including close reading and algorithmic reading; books and social media; books in the age of digital publishing; and much more.
Winter 2027
ENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory I
Prof. Paul Keen
Topic: Marxism Without Guarantees
This course, which takes its name from a Stuart Hall essay, explores the theoretical work of a tradition of Marxist and leftist critics aligned with what Edward Said has described as radical humanism. The first half of the course will focus on three of the most prominent writers within this tradition: Said, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. The second half of the course will then focus on some of the major influences on these thinkers, such as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Lucien Goldman before finishing by discussing more recent theorists who have positioned themselves within and responded to this tradition. Some of the issues we will explore will be their work on questions of agency and hegemony, competing definitions of ideology, the role of the critic, historical materialism, the changing meaning and role of culture, and the changing contexts of Marxist theory today. We will focus on two essays each week, with suggested background readings for those who wish to do further work in any of these areas.
ENGL 5006W: Studies in Theory II
Prof. Travis DeCook
Topic: Theories of Authorship, from Plato to AI
“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over intellectual property, the nature of cultural production, and so-called “artificial intelligence.” This seminar will explore theories of authorship articulated by Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Freud, Nietzsche, Eliot, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, and others. We will examine topics such as inspiration and its secularization; the relationship between the “death of the author” and politics; the ethics of authorship; the origins of intellectual property; notions of social authorship; the relationship between the material book and concepts of authorship; the implications of new media; contemporary “post-copyright” cultural formations; and the implications of artificial intelligence for how we understand the nature of authorship.
ENGL 5606W: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Prof. Dana Dragunoiu
Topic: Nabokov and the Social
Nabokov’s image as a life-long champion of liberal freedoms is not false. Having been raised in late-imperial Russia, doomed to a life of exile by Soviet dictatorship, and chased out of Europe by the rise of Nazi totalitarianism, he produced a body of work that consistently defended the individual against the collective. Since he arrived in the United States, however, his career unfolded against a backdrop of constitutionally protected freedoms and weak collectives. The seminar will focus on the second half of his career during which his defence of liberal freedoms is accompanied by a new concern for the life of the collective. We will read closely the four novels on which his English-language reputation rests: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, and Ada. We will read these in parallel with selections from leading figures from social and economic anthropology, such as Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier, Christopher Gregory, Janet Carsten, Françoise Héritier, and Marshall Sahlins. The aim of the seminar is to trace the extent to which Nabokov’s post-war fiction becomes preoccupied with ideals that convene under the rubric of the social, such as community, loyalty, and solidarity.
ENGL 5606X: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Prof. Brenda Vellino
Topic: Bordercrossing Theatre: Conflict Zone, Environmental and Climate Justice, and Refugee Theatre
Because theatre is a live performance genre bringing living breathing bodies and voices into contact with a living breathing audience, it has a unique capacity to compel affective engagement with pressing ethical issues of our times: post- and mid- conflict remediation, environmental justice/climate change questions, and refugee illegalization. Organized into three thematic clusters, this course seeks to engage theatrical responses to state violence and human rights violations, ecological and climate impacts, and forced migration, as well as to community interventions, reparation demands, resistance, counter-memory, and agency across multiple contexts. Theatre is a particularly rich site within which to examine and interrogate translocal and intercultural connections, conflict negotiation, resistance, solidarity and agency. Sometimes human migration across borders is forced by human rights violations, historical upheaval, economic exchange, war, and toxic social power relations. Sometimes cultural and theatrical modes circulate in ways that allow for strategic re-imaginings. In each of the plays we encounter, we might ask, how do dramatic texts serve as sites of translation and complex negotiation between world views, cultures, ethical frameworks, and imaginings of human and ecological futures? The course is informed by decolonial, Indigenous, diaspora, gender, environmental humanities, and human rights humanities theories and methodologies. We will engage playwrights from Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, South African, Gazan, Syrian, British, and Canadian contexts. Along with reading one play script per week, we will also engage supporting theoretical, cultural, and performance focused essays to contextualize the discussion. Although we will be reading the play scripts, we will engage clips of live productions where possible, and engage the visual language of theatre through stage directions and other cues. Most importantly, we will have two opportunities to engage live theatre when we attend a climate change play at the Great Canadian Theatre Company on February 9th and when students produce live scenes, selected from a play on the course reading list for their final project. Have no fear if you have never been involved with a play production before. This is your chance to partake in the magic of theatre through directing, managing, or acting and experience what happens when a scene comes alive from the printed page through voice and body. Actors will not need to be fully off book.
ENGL 5900X: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS 5301B/CLDM 6103W)
Prof. P. Hodgins
Topic: After AI: reinjecting the “human” back into the humanities
The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 deepened an ongoing crisis of legitimacy and relevancy in the humanities. Even before the emergence of LLMs, enrollments in the humanities had been declining over the previous decades in the face of claims that they did not adequately prepare students for the work world. The retort of defenders of the humanities was that they taught their students to write, to analyze, to research, and to synthesize. However, as we now know, LLMs can do those things as well (but, as we also know, not always all that well).
Recently, a new defense of the humanities has emerged which emphasizes the “human” in the “humanities”. As Nesrine Malik writes in The Guardian: “Writing is about the particular alchemy of a single individual drawing on their own unique profile to construct an idea. It is about the way their brain works, the quirks they have picked up along the way, their politics, their history, their relationships, the very way they see the world.”
In this course, we will read texts by prominent Canadian feminist/decolonial scholars such as Anne Cvetovich, Julietta Singh, Dalie Giroux, and Sophie Tamas. Even before AI, they have worked in different ways to reinject the singular, the quirky and “the human” back into humanities writing by playing with, and often refusing, the lines between autobiography, memory, and history, between fact and fiction, between writing and other media, between research and creation, between the personal and the political. The assignments in this course will encourage students, as emerging humanities scholars, to use the work of these and other writers as models for their own writing.
ENGL 5901W: Selected Topic in English Studies II (FILM 4201B/ENGL 5002W)
Prof. Philip Kaisary
Topic: Capitalism and Critique in Film and Fiction
Debates over contemporary capitalism abound: in mass-market books, on television and radio, in the pages of such publications as The Financial Times and The Economist, in the reports of global management consultancies, and throughout social media and the blogosphere, discussion of contemporary capitalism’s stagnation, failures, manifold crises, and whether or not it can be fixed has become commonplace. As part of this broad debate, cultural forms – including, but not limited to, film, fiction, painting, and photography – have for long constituted a valuable resource for better understanding and articulating critiques of capitalism. An awareness of this deep history undergirds this course in which we will watch and discuss a corpus of fiction films, art films, and documentary films, produced between the 1990s and the present, that address the inequality, unevenness, and sacrifices that are part and parcel of world-wide or global capitalism. Key concepts and categories that will inform our endeavour will include the idea of ‘savage’ capitalism, techno-capitalism, petro-capitalism, capitalism and class stratified society, and capitalism and the contemporary global migrant crisis. In small groups, we will also read a sample of recent speculative fiction addressed to the concept of “techno-capitalism.” These readings will deepen our understanding and develop our project of critique. Reflecting capitalism’s global reach, our corpus of primary materials are drawn from locations including Argentina, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. To enrich our viewing of the films and our reading of the fiction, we will draw on various works of critical social and political theory.